
After two decades in the Southwest studying plant use and cultivation by the native hunter-gatherers and first farmers of the New World, Gary Nabhan, one of America's finest naturalists and nature writers, turns his attention to the Old World, walking the Franciscan Way, nearly two hundred miles from Florence to Assisi. Accompanied by a friend, Nabhan enters the heart of the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside in order to read the landscape as one reads a sacred book, slowly and with growing delight. He talks with peasant farmers, truffle sellers, cooks, and bakers, all eager to share their plants, seeds, cooking methods, and cultural insights with the American pilgrims. Saint Francis has come to be a model for what it means to be human in the natural world, and Nabhan takes him as a guide. This journey becomes a spiritual quest as well as an ethnobotanical field trip. Together with Nabhan we discover what is useful in the old ways, what remains wild in the civilized world, and what in ancient science has survived to make its way into contemporary culture.
Author
Gary Paul Nabhan is an internationally-celebrated nature writer, seed saver, conservation biologist and sustainable agriculture activist who has been called "the father of the local food movement" by Utne Reader, Mother Earth News, Carleton College and Unity College. Gary is also an orchard-keeper, wild forager and Ecumenical Franciscan brother in his hometown of Patagonia, Arizona near the Mexican border. For his writing and collaborative conservation work, he has been honored with a MacArthur "genius" award, a Southwest Book Award, the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing, the Vavilov Medal, and lifetime achievement awards from the Quivira Coalition and Society for Ethnobiology. —from the author's website